Automotive photographer, Dominic Fraser, bought himself a cheap LEGO Audi quattro S1 kit and has been recreating iconic Group B rally scenes.
Instagram can be a place of fakery and genius. It’s the latter we’re exploring today with the awesome work of Dominc Fraser, who has taken his $30 1985 Audi quattro S1 LEGO kit and used it to recreate iconic Group B rally scenes.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m stuck in or around 1985/86 because it was both the best year(s) for rally and also the best year(s) for movies. Some of the greats hit screens, including Highlander, Ghostbusters (okay this was 1984 but you get what I’m saying), Top Gun and more. But for rallyists, 1985 is the zenith of the Group B era.
Don’t know anything about Group B? We’ll keep this brief because this is meant to be about LEGO, but Group B was introduced to get car makers more heavily involved in rally. And it worked. It was just about a no-rules, no worries series where shopping trolley runabouts were converted into fire breathing, all-wheel drive monsters that were as quick on dirt as a Formula One car was on bitumen.
That one year, 1985, was both the best and worst of Group B. It saw the ultimate iterations of the machines car makers were building but it ended up being so dangerous that Group B was cancelled. It means those vehicles have been frozen in time, immortalised if you like.
Enter the coronavirus pandemic and automotive photographer, Dominic Fraser. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, then take a look at magazines like CAR and EVO and websites like Petrolicious, and many more besides.
Stuck at home, Dominic decided to dig out a LEGO kit he’d bought and use it to recreate iconic scenes from the life of the Audi quattro Group B killer. The Internet and Audi’s own image library was used as source material, and the scenes recreated in and around Fraser’s home. Once the pic has been taken, he shares them on his Instagram page.
Speaking with Petrolicious, Fraser said, “This whole current lockdown situation is a strange business creatively. When it started, so many people were, and still are, posting ‘Lockdown lookbacks’ on Instagram, and I certainly thought about doing that myself. However, I looked around at my dormant camera gear and wanted to use this time to actively create something.
“I happened across a little video of someone building the LEGO Quattro. It looked so accurate and I almost immediately thought, ‘I want one of those!’ Once it was ordered, but before delivery, I wondered about recreating some of the photos I could remember from my youth. And so the idea was born. Fortunately my girlfriend Louise and her kids have boxes of redundant LEGO, so it made the whole idea feasible.”
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